It's a strange trajectory that Sonic Youth have followed, from their early "Kill Yr Idols" iconoclasm to their present mode as rock mythomaniacs bringing up the rear for Neil Young (an idol of theirs). And as "Eric's Trip" blazes over the heads (in every sense) of the bovine arena hordes, one has to wonder whether your average cud-chewing US rocker can get his head around the rock-as-radiation/kaleid-ophrenic lyrics aesthetic. Like, where are the riffs, man?

Sonic Youth look awful small in this environment, but their music fares a lot better. The venue's scale and extra wattage bring a whole new volume (in the cubic, voluminous sense) to their sound. Even the songs from Goo, which seemed so trimmed and lame on vinyl, now rage in sparkling 5D, free of the album's dead-aired, dessicated production. I still marvel at how the people who wrote the lyrics for Daydream Nation (among the best rock poetry of the last decade) could also be responsible for twee conceits like "Tunic" or "Kool Thing". But live, the dumb words are swamped; "Kool Thing" is jagged and forbidding as a glacier, while "Tunic" gives way to a fissure of clustered harmonics hanging in the air like motes after a quarry explosion. For me, it's still Lee Ranaldo who's Sonic Youth's true textural/tectonic wizard, and Thurston & Gordon who are culpable for the Pop Art/postmodern fetish for 2D cartoon imagery of teen revolt and radical chic. But with the closing, awesome "Expressway To Yr Skull", such distinctions are obliterated. The sound is collective, amorphous, seemingly origin-less; at first a deadly mirage, then, in the Hendrixian feedback-sculpting coda, membrane after membrane of mummifying haze. Sonic Youth, as irritating individuals, disappear in their own wake.

Hendrix's "Star Spangled Banner" trails the arrival of Crazy Horse, and prompts a ghastly misunderstanding; most of the audience are oblivious to the agonised irony of Jimi's version (the sonic equivalent of burning the flag as a torch for the young dead in 'Nam) and respond with unmistakeably jingoistic fervour. But the misunderstanding originates in a crucial ambivalence in Neil Young's own attitude, externalised in the disparity between the peace flag unveiled behind the stage and the yellow ribbon for the troops tied to the giant mike stand upfront. Young's audience comprises both burnt-out hippy pacifists and blue collar patriots because he himself has followed a trajectory from the counter culture to born-agin Reaganism. And these contradictions turn on the ambiguity of the word "freedom" - whether it simply means a free market society or some grander, vaguer existensial liberty; whether the first might in fact be the enemy of the latter.

Neil Young's work is located in the slipstream of the two great American traumatic disillusionments: the closing of the frontier at the end of the 19th Century, and the closing of the psychological/existensial frontier opened up in the late 1960's. "After the goldrush", there's just stranded lives, stagnant ideals, a utopia gone awry. Today, in the midst of US industrialised rock, Neil Young and Crazy Horse have a mythical resonance similar to that vested by Sam Peckinpah in the aged outlaw gang of The Wild Bunch: they're incorrigible, cantakerous, battered yet heroic survivals of a grander age. But instead of the railroad companies, it's MTV and a rock biz integrated with Hollywood, advertising and merchandising, that's ushering in a lowlier future.

With his grizzled locks (clearly a stranger to conditioner), weatherbeaten countenance and stooped gait, Neil Young seems to contradict his own adage that "it's better to burn out than to fade away". Except that his music uniquely combines ragged stamina and tempestuous incandescence; at its peak it's like a decrepit inferno. What shocked me was the sheer NOISE of his playing. Young brings new meaning to worn-out terms like "powerchord" (even on sweet songs like "Cinnamon Girl", they're like breakers crashing over your head) and "catharsis". His solos aren't decorative, but volcanic, driven, purgative, like he's trying to untie an unyielding knot of anguish inside himself. Stomping grimly around the lip of the stage, lashing and gouging his instrument, Young churns up a sensurround maelstrom that's like the missing link between Jimi and Albini. "Break It Down" and "Fuckin Up" are sundered by a freefall of mangled wreckage and flaming debris.

Where Sonic Youth are avant-gardists dipping a toe in the populist mainstream, Neil Young's populist rock'n'roll breaks its own hokey bounds continually, spills into free noise. Like his politics, Young's music blurs the border between reactionary and revolutionary. If there's nostalgia here, it's not a wistful longing for home but for homelessness; an untamed wilderness unspoilt by settlements and sell-outs, a place "where I can leave myself behind". That foreclosed frontier of freedom rages still in the razing glory of Young's guitar.

If ever a band deserved an expansive approach that bursts the limits of the rock biography format, it's Sonic Youth. They're one of the most pretentious (a compliment in my book) rock bands of the last decade. Sonic Youth have always consciously aimed to refract the Zeitgeist in their noiseswirl; they're culture vultures who ransack both avant-garde and trash for morsels of inspiration. This is not a dumb band, despite their puerile admiration for the thoughtlessness of teen delinquents and psychopaths; this is a learned band. Bassist/singer Kim Gordon used to write art and music criticism for Artforum and Village Voice; the band's record sleeves have consistently used work by artists like Raymond Pettibon and Mike Kelley.

Nonetheless, Alec Foege shies away from using this band as a lauching pad for high-falutin' speculation. Confusion Is Next conforms to the pedestrian, fact-bound norms of the rock biog. Foege is able enough at untangling the roots of the band in the late '70s downtown No Wave and avant-garde scenes. And like most fan-biogs, this is a treasury of fanziney data, like the fascinating nitty-gritty of Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo's use of weird tunings and their mammoth collection of fucked-up, unique-sounding guitars. But anything more ambitious--i.e. what Sonic Youth "means"--and Foege's prose starts to seize up. His account of how and why the Sister LP was deeply influenced by Philip K. Dick's paranoiac s.f. is hopelessly befuddled, and his attempt to sketch the political backdrop to Goo lapses into bombastic socio-cultural generalisations that reek of an over-caffeinated brain at 5-30 AM the day before final deadline.

Foege casually uses the phrase "revolutionary rock band" to describe Sonic Youth, but he never really suggests why they might be revolutionary, nor indeed what such a phrase could possibly mean in the '90s. Actually, SY's journey from Lower East Side noisenik cult to Geffen-indentured art-grunge semi-stars raises a host of questions about subversion, about the rival strategies of avant-garde purism versus entryist populism. Sonic Youth have lived on both sides of this dilemma, making brilliant avant-rock with Sister and Daydream Nation, then trying to bring a tidied up version of that extremism to the MTV masses (with the botched Goo and the merely solid Dirty). As Greil Marcus argues here, SY are bohemian at heart, have always lacked the pop instincts "that animated Kurt Cobain at his best". They're most inspired musically, most true to themselves, as margin-walkers forever searching for the new cool, always staying ahead of the herd. Cooler-than-thou is why they're always interesting, but also why they're a band that's hard to love.

With their most recent LP, the wilfully anti-commercial Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, SY's frame of reference has shifted from the 'alternative mainstream' (Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, bands they influenced but could never match in the marketplace), back to the indie scene: lo-fi bands like Sebadoh and Royal Trux, improv-squall artists like Keiji Haino and Rudolph Grey, a world of 7 inch singles, one-off collaborations, and bands who deliberately use antiquated, valve-driven studios rather than state-of-the-art digital recording. Perhaps Sonic Youth realised, after 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', how quickly disruption is smoothed back into business-as-usual. Perhaps they realised that their true voice was not outspoken (the quasi-anthemic "Youth Against Fascism", on the election-year Dirty) but cryptic, cloudy, and yes, confusing. A book about Sonic Youth that tries to make "sense" out of that sensual chaos is missing the point, surely; it should aggravate the confusion, be as hallucinated as the band's best work.

these reissues in honor of the recent flurry of books about and/or inspired by "the hippest cats on the block" who "make everybody else look square" (D. Keenan)

Saturday, August 16, 2008

"I don't think I had any real musical influences," Bernard Parmegiani has declared. Certainly, it's true that he started out lacking any academic training in composition. A sound engineer for French television, he caught the musique concrete bug through an experimental music radio show called Club d'Essai. In the late Fifties Parmegiani dabbled in the young form during TV studio down-time he sneaked on the sly. Then, having teamed up with composer Andre Almuro as the latter's engineer, his promise came to the attention of Pierre Schaeffer. But it took the godfather of concrete two whole years to steal Parmegiani away from TV (and a burgeoning side-career as a mime artist!). Only then did Parmegiani undergo, as a bureaucratic formality, the obligatory two-year composition course required to join the Groupe de Recherche Musicales.

Parmegiani's sideways trajectory through the French equivalent of the BBC makes for a wonderfully wonky career path: from humble tape operator to venerable composer with a grand oeuvre now neatly tied-up and boxed in this twelve-disc set. The parallel would be if Dick Mills, chief sound effects maker at the Radiophonic Workshop, had been encouraged by the Beeb to lay aside Goons Show gastric-rumbles and Dalek voices and dedicate his energies to hour-long concrete operas inspired by A.J. Ayer. By the mid-Sixties, that was exactly what Parmegiani was up to: composing long-form works sparked by the philosophical pensees of Gaston Bachelard. The imprint of the latter's classic ruminations on human perception as related to space, time, and the "poetics" of the four elements is detectable in Parmegiani titles like "L'Instant mobile" and "Capture ephemere"; often he would embark on a composition armed with nothing but a title borrowed from or inspired by the philosopher.

More suggestive, in some ways, though, is the slightly later influence on Parmegiani of another French philosopher, Clement Rosset, author of a series of books whose titles translate as Against Nature, Phantasmagorias, and Reality and Its Double. Rosset's "artificialist" sensibility--art as an exquisite lie--has an obvious fit with Schaeffer's acousmatic notion of "sonorous objects" that can't be traced back to their physical source. Concrete, in its purest form, is non-referential, constructed from sound-matter so drastically mutated, morphed and molded, it's become falsified, fantasticated.

In the booklet accompanying L'Oeuvre Musicale, Parmegiani talks revealingly about an artistic past-time that preceded his adventures in sonic fiction: photomontage. He'd cut out a large number of image-fragments from magazines--human limbs, machine parts, etc--and then glue them into surreal assemblages. His music-making would follow a similar process, starting with the building-up of a sound-bank, an inventoried miscellany of noises, before embarking on composition. Compared to the photocollages, though, Parmegiani's music has at least one extra element: life. It's analogous maybe to animators who use stop-motion film techniques to bring a queer vitality to their materials, whether three-dimensional puppets or photographic and illustrative material (as with Terry Gilliam's Monty Python collages). "I do consider sounds as living things," Parmegian has said. But with concrete as with animation, the movement in the musique is life-like but umheimlich.

This unsettling sensation is particularly vivid with the pieces that anticipate the sample-spun chimera of plunderphonics. 1969's "Pop' Eclectic" draws heavily on the heavy and proggy rock sounds of the day, spiced with Light Programme-style MOR and Radio 3-style solemnity. Much of the piece resembles pureed Soft Machine, an ivy-like mass of dissected and intertwined grooves further weirded with dizzy-making stereo pans and speaker-channel cut-outs. From the same year, "Du Pop A L'Ane is like a duet between radios that are both dialing randomly across the FM spectrum: chintzy Gallic accordions collide with severe Webern pianos and lewdly honking Dixieland, with recognizable rock showing its face every so often (the Doors--the Manzarek chug of "When The Music's Over", the mock-classical shlock of "Spanish Caravan"--being particularly favored, for some reason).

Avoiding outright referentiality and therefore closer to the purely acousmatic, 1970's "Ponomatopees" nonetheless unnerves because so much of its raw material is clearly sourced from the human voice. The first section weaves processed whispers and vocal snippets into a writhing tapestry of unlife; later on, disembodied vowel sounds recede down cavernous passages, like dead astronauts bobbing weightlessly through an asteroid's catacombed interior.

Space, in all senses of the word (outer, inner, architectural, etc), irresistibly suggests itself when listening to and thinking about the music of the post-WW2 avant-garde. Parmegiani's "experiences" have often been constructed so that sounds are directed to specific speakers in specially designed auditoriums. Even heard on plain-old stereo, many of his pieces resemble honeycombs of incompatible spatialities, or mazes build using all four dimensions rather than the usual two. Parmegiani used a similar trope when describing his intent with 'L'Oeil Ecoute", which was to guide his sounds "into our inner labyrinths". Listening to that composition (which translates as "the listening eye") and similar ones like "Pour En Finir Avec Le Pouvoir D'Orphee", Op Art springs to mind: just as the eyeball is almost physically wrenched by Bridget Riley's disorientating patterns, you can imagine ear-strain being induced by Parmegiani's perspectival distortions. "Kaleidoscope 2", the fourth of "Orphee's"'s six movements, is like a Vasarely canvas in a hall of mirrors. "L'Oscillee", the next segment, sounds like the heavenly host armed with Jews harps rather than the regular angelic kind, while the climactic "Unisson Des Voix," is a calvacade of rubbery judders that seems to tumble up a hill. 1971's "La Roue Ferris" is something of a peak. The title refers not to the fairground wheel, its literal translation, but a Mexican firework that turns as it burns. With its wheels-within-wheels-on-fire structure, the piece evokes the logical, yet perfectly senseless precision of Nature's cycles, whose apparent orderliness is actually born from the primordial violence of the cosmos, the ontological gash of the Big Bang.

The vital counterbalance to the seriousness and ambition of Parmegiani epics like "La Creation Du Monde" and "De Natura Sonorum" is his playfulness (he's said that he pursues a music that plays "with sound in the same way one can play with a ball or with words"), his child-like sense of curiosity and discovery, even the streak of puerile mischief that occasionally pops up. "Des Mots and Des Sons" takes the piss out of the concert-hall world, using soundbites from a radio presenter expounding the middlebrow ideology of classical music as sanctuary from the modern era's nerve-jangling disequilibrium. Platitudes about the relaxing, restorative power of the music's "calm and serene energy" are dropped into a progressively more turbulent slice-and-dice of orchestral and audience sounds (the faint hubbub before a concert performance, coughs, etc), which further degenerates into a syncopated flurry of glottal stops and minced vowel sounds. As lampoons goes, it's crude but hilariously on point.

Some of this Rabelaisian rawness seems to fade as Parmegiani's work enters the digital era. He was among the first at GRM to embrace the new technology, but admits that although the shift from "scissors to mouse" involved huge gains on the time-saving and hassle-reduction fronts, there were also obscure losses. Listening to "Sons-Jeux", a piece whose original 1998 version was made to commemorate musique concrete's 50th Anniversary, there are spectacular effects in terms of the transformation of material: insect sounds turn into human voices and a babble of agitated male speech gets whisked into an iridescent foam of voice-cellules
(like molecular gastronomy if human souls were its raw ingredients). Yet permeating the seemingly infinite variety of textures is a hard-to-put-your-finger-on homogeneity, like garments that are wildly different in shape yet cut from the identical fabric. For some reason, digital technology seems to exacerbate concrete's already-existing bias towards certain sound-textures--plinky liquidity, slithery sibilance (perhaps because these sorts of sounds least resemble those of acoustic instrumental provenance?).

Returning to the earlier analogy, you could say that digital sound parallels the advances in animation made by the likes of Pixar (plus all those action thrillers so CGI-riddled they are virtually animations incorporating human actors). Massive increments in terms of mindblowing verging-on-3D effects, microscopic detail and sheer density of simultaneous events are offset by the loss of analogue grain, an insidious seamlessness and sameyness. Whereas the Sixties and Seventies Parmegiani regularly provokes the I-can't-believe-my-ears of a true sound-sorcerer in action, some of the latterday pieces approach numbing overload.